Saturday, December 18, 2010

Whether you
celebrate this season with different images
or with no images at all, my warmest wishes
go out to you all and may your spirit
be moved by all the beautiful things
in the universe, visible and invisible.

Meanwhile, I sent a
submission to the latest >LANGUAGE>PLACE CARNIVAL and am very pleased that it's there
now (video of my stay in Tavira, Portugal) under the heading Slipping Boundaries,
amongst the other wonderful entries on Nicolette
Wong's blog Meditations
in an Emergency.

I have made a firm
resolution to return to La
Vie en Roséas
soon as the New Year kicks in and you have
my authorisation to remind of this resolution,
loudly and clearly.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

The calendar, the
weather, the people streaming in and out
of shops, the seasonal cards arriving already,
the Things To Finish This Year list
I made last year and all the lists I've
ever made....my whole life
suddenly seems like one big end-of-year
guilt-ridden apology to myself
and others:

SO SORRY I'M LATE!

No. Not true
that I'm sorry. Can't be true. If it were
true I wouldn't keep on being late.
Lateness must be a state I enjoy. A state
I prefer to the state of punctuality,
the state of finishing things, the state
of satisfaction. Lateness must be what I'm
really good at. If I annoy, disappoint
or inconvenience others with my lateness,
my unfinishedness, that's their problem,
isn't it? And if I disappoint, enrage, inconvenience
myself that's my problem, isn't it?

Yes. That is my problem.

(I
did the drawing below using the wondrous HARMONY application
created by Mr.doob, Ricardo Cabello).

To round
off my last post, I must say something
about Snow which
I have just finished reading. I
now have no doubt that the mythological KA or
double was present in the author's
mind when he worked out the structure of
this book.

First
of all, the fictional narrator 'Orhan'
is the double of the real author, Orhan Pamuk.
Secondly, Orhan tells the
story based on his dead friend Ka's diaries
and re-traces Ka's journey, trying to see
things as the poet did four years ago. The
'double' theme is taken up again in the
close relationship between the two teen-age
boys, Necip and Fazil, who read each other's
minds. After Necip is shot, Fazil says to
Ka: "It's
possible that Necip's soul is now living
inside my body."

Other
instances of doubling, as well as of duplicity,
are scattered throughout the story. This
is particulary intriguing to me because I
was searching for the lesson implied
in my dream. I have yet to figure that
out but never mind the dream - was I impressed
by
Snow?

Impressed,
yes. It's an impressive achievement. If it
was a sculpture, it would be a public monument
standing in a town
square. A realistic sculpture but with modernist
touches, lots of intricately crafted detail
and symbols. Was I moved by it? No.
Its monumentality, its intention to be
an important novel creates a distance like
those barriers not letting
you get too near valuable works of art
in a museum. While I admire Pamuk's grasp
of the complex politics and beliefs of his
compatriots and the tremendous skill with
which he weaves them into a story, he doesn't
make me care about individual
characters. Apart from being told repeatedly
that Ka's love-object, Ipek, is stunningly
beautiful, what do I know about her personality?
It has less substance than the snowflakes
which dominate the setting. I feel the same
about the other protagonists (perhaps Necip
is the exception). They are all actors on
a stage, reading their roles, and once
I've left this theatre, I forget them. The
other factor which alienates me from this
novel is the surfeit of information: too
much, too much! Just when my attention
is captured by an incident or conversation,
I'm immediately pulled away to look at something
else, some irrelevant detail. This is infuriating.

Voilà.
I'm obviously not going to join the ranks
of those who adore Orhan Pamuk's writing
but I will, definitely, take my hat off to
him.

Monday, November 29, 2010

At about 2 am a couple
of days ago I
pulled out a book on Egyptian mythology
from the shelf where it sits with
many other books about ancient Egypt. As
you know if you're a regular visitor
here, I feel an intimate familarity with
ancient Egyptian culture, art and ambiance,
even though I have no actual connection
to Egypt. It's one of those déja
vu things,
if you believe in reincarnation, or simply
affinity if you don't. Anyway I suddenly
wanted to re-read about the Ka.

In art the ka was
portrayed in several ways: a person identical
to the person whom it was associated
with, as a shadowy figure, as a person
with two upraised arms on his head.........The
ka is a manifestation of vital
energy........The ka could also be seen as the conscience
or guide of each individual, urging kindness,
quietude, honor and compassion......In
images and statues of the ka,
they are depicted as their owner in an
idealized state of youth, vigor and beauty......The
ka is
the origin and giver of all the Egyptians
saw as desirable, especially eternal
life.

EventuaIly
I went to bed and had this dream: I
was watching a panel of critics discussing
a book which was either called SNOW or
had that word in the title. The people
on the panel were very c0mplimentary
about it but one of them began
arguing vehemently. She was a gnarled
old woman with a prominent nose
and mouth and dusky skin colour.
She was sarcastic about
books and films portraying Jewish subjects
in banal ways and I thought she meant that SNOW was
one of these. But her tone suddenly changed
and she began to praise it warmly, saying
it wasn't like any of the others.

That's all I remember
but the dream was extremely
vivid, as if I'd been watching a live debate
on television. When I woke up I immediately
turned on the computer and googled snow to
see if there is a book by that name. There
is: it's SNOW by
Orhan Panuk.
I'd never heard of it (shame on me) so
I read a summary of the plot:

Pamuk's hero is
a dried-up poet named Kerim Alakusoglu,
conveniently abbreviated to Ka: Ka
in kar in Kars. (The
word for snow in Turkish is Kar).

Though most of the
early part of the story is told in the
third person from Ka's point of
view, an omniscient narrator sometimes
makes his presence known, posing as a
friend of Ka's who is telling
the story based on Ka's journals
and correspondence. This narrator sometimes
provides the reader with information
before Ka knows it or foreshadows
later events in the story.

As if that wasn't enough
synchronicity, I wanted to find out if there
was yet another link in the dream to ponder,
so I googled snow together with Jewish .
I got Phoebe
Snow (real name Phoebe Ann Laub)
a jazz/blues singer, best known for
her 1975 hit The Poetry Man, a
video of which I found here .
Pamuk's character
in SNOW is a 'poetry man' - Phoebe
Snow is Jewish but changed her name
(her double, her KA).

What are all those
dream and real connections trying to tell
me? What do you make
of this sequence of serial synchronicities:

1. Ancient
Egyptian KA or
double> 2. dream:
discussion about book called SNOW>3. dream: old woman
with dusky skin dismisses banal Jewish productions>4. in reality SNOW is book by Orhan Panuk
>5. main character is poet called KA>
6. in
the book KA has a 'double' called
Orhan Panuk >7. Turkish word for snow is Kar >8. singer Phoebe SNOWis
Jewish, her real ('double') surname is Traub
9. another doubling: she has become a Buddhist>
10. her skin colour is dusky: people have
thought she is black>11. her hit song was The
Poetry Man.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

I stayed
on in Florence for a year after we all left
the Villa Ulivi but that story will go into
my autobio when I get around to filling in
the many blanks in time and space. Right
now we're talking about my Papa. In the photo
below he's arriving at an airport - I'm not
sure where or when - but it's so characteristic
of him: the eternal traveller, always arriving
or leaving

My father
had many theories and one which he wrote,
re-wrote and talked a great deal about over
the years was called: TheFocus
of Perception .
It was the basis for
his next project and also influenced
his observations of people in
general. Here are some edited
quotes which I've selected from
his notes:

The premise of The
Focus of Perception is that the mind
contains a mechanism or process similar
to a camera lens which, by its aperture
and angle, determines the way people,
situations and events are perceived and
thus one's emotional and intellectual
responses to them. This process is psychological,
not visual, but the camera is a useful
metaphor to describe it.

Not only
do we contradict one
another, but we also tend to contradict
ourselves. Human contradiction and its
effects, whether on a personal or a global
scale, might be better understood if
the Focus of Perception was observed
in action within one's self and in
others' behavior and attitudes. Relationships,
whether between individuals, groups
or nations, often undergo a cavalcade
of contradictory states, affirmations
and negations, depending on the angle
at which the Focus is set, how wide the
angle is and whether it is static or
fluctuating.

There is a great
difference between understanding another person through
their focus and
trying to understand them only through
one's own. In the absence of a strong
motivation - such as love, a specific
goal, or the desire for truth - we see
no reason to change our Focus of Perception
and we passively accept whatever focus
is provided by our upbringing, environment,
or the winds of fashion. But if we become
aware of our focal position in relation
to others, it becomes possible to
change what had seemed immutable in ourselves.

We are prisoners
within the boundaries of our current
focus only if we accept to be imprisoned
in this optic. To change one's focal
position, it is necessary first of all
to change it on a specific subject or
problem: to make a leap. This might result
in moving to a position diametrically
opposed to our current stance. With further
small steps, a change may occur
in our perception of the particular issue,
and thence a gradual opening of our understanding
of the larger picture.

Sacha's new
undertaking, although rooted
in the above premise, took shape in a
less theoretical way. He called
it Who
Do You Think You Are . This
happens to be the name of a current television
series but I'm fairly sure they
don't know that my father thought of the
title long ago. Anyway the TV series is
about celebrities looking into their
genealogical history. Sacha's project was
something else entirely.

He began by contacting
three people: Françoise
Sagan, whose slim first novel Bonjour
Tristesse had propelled her to
instant fame; Art
Buchwald, the witty satirist whose regular
column in the Washington Post my father loved;
and Gipsy
Rose Lee, the burlesque stripper/actress.
When his project was described
to them they agreed to take part. There was
no connection between these three and I have
no idea what prompted Sacha to choose them
as subjects for his enquiry.

He recorded
audio interviews with each of them, asking
them to describe how they saw themselves.
Separate interviews were then arranged with
some of their friends, acquaintances and
colleagues, to record their own views of
these individuals. The aim of the exercise
was to demonstrate that the image we have
of ourselves frequently contradicts the
impressions others have of us. No conclusions
or judgements were offered as to which views
were the 'truer' ones. We were simply asked
to consider the possibility that 'who we
think we are' is open to many interpretations.

In one of those amazing
synchronicities that the blogosphere occasionally
generates,
Jean in
her perceptive review of Summertime by
J.M. Coetzee, seems to have tuned into my
father's thinking and into what I was about
to blog concerning it. She wrote on 19 November:

It's
something we could all do: speculate on how
our intimates might describe us. But,
think about
it, put yourself there... I can quickly
see that
I'd do one of two things: construct a
rosy, seamless
image - the wish-fulfilment version, or
go way
the other way and indulge my darkest
fantasies
of how they all disliked and despised me
really.

The audio interviews
were only the preliminary
stage: Sacha's intention
was to make a film, if funding could be
raised. This didn't happen
and Who DoYou Think You Are was
shelved and forgotten. But at least the
memory of it now lives on, here in this tiny
corner of cyberspace.

Before ending this
flashback into some of my father's creative
adventures, there's one more I must mention:
the thirteen
minute film, Report on Love , a
comic commentary on the Kinsey Report,
produced and directed by Sacha in 1955.

When Dr. Kinsey first
heard of the film he prepared to sue, without
having seen it. But after a preview was arranged
especially for him at Indiana University
(where he was Professor of Zoology) he
changed his mind and the film went ahead,
screened in cinemas across the USA as the
'featurette' along with major films; it was
even nominated for an Academy Award. Below
is a write-up from Picture Week in
New York.

I have a copy of the
film on VHS tape and watched it again a few
days ago. It is extremely
dated conceptually and technically
but quite clever, combining animation
and live action. Light-weight stuff
compared to Sacha's other projects but I
think he was hoping this one would achieve
commercial success. It didn't, but
so what? It was not gold but a little glitter
never hurt anyone.

Friday, November 19, 2010

To give you some idea
of how Sacha's concept was presented to
the students, I've done the rough sketch/montage
below but it's
nowhere near accurate. Why didn't anyone
think of keeping a photographic record of
the whole experience? Too busy,
I guess.

My father had gathered
an enthusiastic team of volunteers and everyone
pitched in with ideas and work. Two giant
wooden spools were built by a local carpenter
and a very long roll of canvas was
wound around them. With the spools positioned
an appropriate distance apart, mounted
on spindles and rotated by two people
standing at either end, hidden by curtains,
the sequence of images painted on the canvas
slowly unrolled before the audience.

The students - no more
than about five or ten at a time - sat
on high-backed chairs in one of the large,
beautiful rooms of the house.
In dim light, a recorded narration and music
were played, paced to match the unwinding
canvas. A film, without film
technology. There were no computers, no
PowerPoint, no DVDs or CDs at the time but
the performance was all the more intriguing
for being so low-tech and DIY.

Where is that recording
of the House of Contrasts script?
I don't know, but I do have a copy
of some of the text. Where is that huge roll
of canvas? Possibly
in Rome, in storage, unless destroyed.
And who painted it? Um...moi...with
slight assistance from
an Italian multi-media artist and conversationalist.

When I first walked
into the Villa Ulivi, I was astonished by
the buzz of creative activity. My mother
and little brother had arrived from New York
as well as several relatives from France,
recruited to help with the proceedings.
There were also the Italian crew and of course
my older sister Annie (autobio
P.16) a key player in my father's scheme.
Annie was working at the time for a student
travel company in New York and it was she
who organised the visits of students to the
House of Contrasts, as well as taking them
to meet leading personalities on the Italian
cultural scene. There she met her future
husband, the writer Gerardo
Guerrieri, but that's yet another story.

My main role was to
illustrate Sacha's Dante-esque script on
that huge roll of canvas but I had insisted,
even before seeing it, that I would need
help. So my father found and somehow - unbelievably
- managed to persuade a very busy artist/architect/designer
to be my 'collaborator'. This collaboration
was the most enjoyable I've ever experienced
but it consisted almost entirely of talking.

Before coming to Italy,
I did not know that talking could be an art-form
or that a mere verbal exchange could be a
performance, with all the colour, magic and
mystery of opera. Or that it could actually
be a substitute for action. All Italians
can talk this way but some are more gifted
than others and Giorgio was a genius at it.
I don't remember a word of what we talked
about but it must have concerned the
task we were supposed to be working on. Did
Giorgio ever apply brush to canvas? I don't
remember that either but he did have great
ideas.

The
canvas had to be ready for the first presentation
of the summer and Giorgio was very busy with
his multiple activities so I found myself
inevitably and urgently responsible for covering
that six-foot tall and endlessly wide ribbon
of canvas with interpretations of Sacha's
verbal panorama of hellish and heavenly stereotypes.
I think I used a lot of red and black in
painting the hellish and a lot of pastel
hues for the heavenly but apart from that,
don't ask me what the finished work looked
like because it has entirely escaped my memory.

What I do remember
nostalgically
was the table at mealtimes. There were usually
at least a dozen people around the long,
chunky table and much laughter and animated
talk while huge bowls of pasta and fresh
green salad were devoured and glasses were
refilled with the local wine. Outside on
the stone terrace small green lizards dozed
in the sun. My little brother loved the lizards
and imitated their shy, watchful concentration.
Here he is at that time, making like a lizard
at Villa Ulivi, the House of Contrasts.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Fast
forwarding, skipping over Sacha's
South American and other ventures
because I want to focus on the more off-beat
things his restless imagination drove him
to undertake. Come to think of it, everything
he undertook was off the beaten track.

Here
he is in Florence - I don't
know who took the above photo but it strikingly
captures him in inward-turned, isolated
mood, oblivious to his surroundings.
Whatever the triggers which could set off
his recurrent bouts of melancholy, Sacha's
response was always to leave, move, travel
far away and begin something new. In this
instance New York was the place he left and
the something new was an idea he conceived
- perhaps on the way from one city to the
next - for which a special
house in special surroundings was required.
Once an idea had taken root in my father's
mind it began growing instantly, spreading
antennae in all directions and locating with
extraordinary serendipity all the elements
needed for its realisation. Thus he found
the special house in the special surroundings:
it was called Villa Ulivi, within walking
distance of the heart of Florence - you could see
the Duomo from
the rooftop terrace.

How
Sacha came to discover this magnificent
fifteenth century residence I do not
know but he did, and it happened to be
for rent, and so he rented it for several
months. Apart from a photo of
my recently resurrected
painting (see January 20, 2010)
of cypress trees in the garden, the only
picture I can find of the villa is the
black and white snapshot below. Yesterday,
on the off-chance, I googled Villa
Ulivi and...what do you know?...the
Villa is alive and well and has
become a hotel (I
borrowed the colour picture of the
house from their website). A very
nice hotel apparently but I don't
recognise the current interior decoration.
When Sacha moved in, and later on
all our family, there was very little
furniture, only a few beautiful,
darkly austere Renaissance antiques.

Sacha named his project The House
of Contrasts. Here's
a summary, taken from a description
written after the event:

It was proposed
that a demonstration of positive
and negative stereotyped views about
each other held by two cultures, American
and European, presented in dramatic fashion
and in uninterrupted succession, could
produce an enlightening psychological
shock. This shock would help to crystallize
one's own manner of seeing and perhaps
also come a step closer to the goal:
a kinder and more tolerant understanding
of one person, or one nation, towards
another.

The experiment
was tested on groups of American college
students on a cultural tour of Italy.
A Florentine villa was the setting
for the demonstration and the script,
narration, music and graphic presentation
was prepared by voluntary collaboration
between American and Europeans. The stereotype
views were shown in allegorical fashion,
inspired by Dante: the negative clichés
were 'Inferno' while the positive
ones were 'Contrastland'. The reactions,
opinions and criticisms of each group
of students who visited the House of
Contrasts were tape-recorded to serve
as valuable records for further exploration
of this theme.

I was in New York
pursuing my art education when my father's
idea and Villa Ulivi got together and
the House of Contrasts began to take shape.
At first I resisted his urging me to come
and work on the visual presentation - I felt
it would distract me from my own path. But
Sacha's power of persuasion was hard
to resist, especially when
it offered such an intriguing situation
in such tempting surroundings.

I'd better
continue this in another post, otherwise
I'm just going to be at this computer all
night. Part 3 coming up next - is anyone
still here?

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

I had decided to post
something on October
30th, the fourteenth anniversary
of my father's final departure (1996)
but I've been finding it really hard
to get down to blogging recently.
It could be the blogging blues,
which we all experience from time to time,
or it could be the advancing
dark dreariness of winter, or it could be
that I'm concentrating on other things.

Whatever the reason
for this twelve-day delay,
I will now write this post for Sacha,
my dear father Alexander d'Arbeloff (not
the same person as Alex V. d'Arbeloff who
died in July 2008 - see my blog post July 9, 2008).

I mentioned Sacha
on this page of
my ongoing autobiography - yes, the autobio will be
updated: it's on my to-be-continued list
so of course it will be continued
- and also blogged about him on October
23, 2003 but such a many-sided
individual can't be summed up in
a few family memories or an obituary - he
deserves a whole book to himself. I wouldn't
be the person to write it but there's no
doubt that he had a tremendous influence
on me and certain things in his story stand
out particularly sharply in my mind.

Sacha
had already undergone several life-shaking
traumas by the time he was in his teens: boiling
water from
a samovar accidentally spilled on his chest
when he was a child. Confusing
(or repressed) memories of intense family
upheavals. Seeing dead bodies on the streets
of Baku during chaotic political riots.
Escaping from Russia during
dramatic circumstances of the
revolution. A hyper-sensitive and deeply
introspective young man, it's not surprising
that he then had a nervous breakdown - or
what we would now call clinical depression
- and was sent to a sanatorium. There are
a lot of blanks and question marks in the
information we tried to gather about
those years in Sacha's life but I do know
that after some temporary periods in Switzerland
and the U.S.A. he stayed in Paris and became
involved in cinema and publishing.

The film-maker
and film historian Kevin
Brownlow when researching his book Napoleon,
about Abel Gance's film
of that name, interviewed Sacha in
the 1980s about his role in that production
(my father's comments are on pp 99-101
of Brownlow's book). Briefly: a small
film company was formed by Sacha and
his cousin, Jacques Grinieff and other
associates. Eventually, they were able
to raise the funds to make Abel Gance's
ground-breaking movie. By then my father
had resigned from the company but Grinieff
went on to become a film producer
in America. (Many many moons later, in New York, Uncle Jacques gave me a job adapting film scripts. But that's another story).

After the cinema experience,
Sacha decided to publish a magazine. It was called
AUDACES (boldness in the plural:
boldnesses?) Below
is the cover of one 1934 issue. The magazine
was a mix of current events - eg: article
by J.B.Priestley about an ominous fascist
demonstration in Manchester. Themed interviews
- eg: What
role have men played in your life? answered
by actresses Colette, Gaby
Morlay and others. How they judge -
Judges talking about their experiences.
Some comic pieces. A sensational crime story.
Lots of pictures of women
in 'seductive' poses. Photo-montages
of people in the news. Cinema reviews etc.

I don't know how long
Sacha persisted in the magazine venture
but apparently it was successful. It must
have been around this time in Paris that
he also wrote and published two novels under
the pseudonym Alexandre Darlaine. One was: Il
Etait Une Fois Une Femme et Une Jeune Fille (There
was once a woman and a young girl). The
other was titled Crépuscule
de la Raison (Twilight of reason). I
have a very time-scarred copy of the first.
The latter was turned into a play but was
never performed, although many years later,
probably in the 1960s or 1970s, the well-known
Italian sound-track composer, Mario
Nascimbene, composed two pieces of music
for it - I'm unsure about dates but
I do have these music sheets:
Chanson de Florine and Scène
Florine et Daniel. Sacha's novels
were poetic, romantic, melancholy - more
reveries than stories. I'm incapable
of judging them objectively because I know
that they were about his view of Blanche,
my mother, and their relationship, however
fictionalised.

My
aim with this post is not to analyse my father's
personality but simply to present
some of the achievements of his life
that are little known. I'm getting
the references together for PartTwo so don't go away.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

I have a thing about
apples, not so much about eating them as
painting them. I like eating them too but
that's nothing to do with my attraction
to them as models. There's something basic,
down to earth and yet mysterious
about the shape and colour of an apple and,
if you want to dwell on the mysterious,
of course there's all that mythological apple-lore.
The fact that I happen to have an Apple
computer is neither here or there.

Every so often I go
back to painting an apple in order to try
and capture what
else is
going on: what is Appleness? What's happening when
my eyes and consciousness meet this apple?
What is there that isn't obvious?

Here's my latest apple,
finished yesterday, painted entirely with
a palette knife. My model was just one apple
placed on a slanting drawing board, supported
by a bit of BluTak so it wouldn't roll down.
The lower apple is not another apple but
the top one repeated.

Appleness Oil
on canvas. 41 cm X 30 cm October 2010

And this
one, painted a few years ago in the same
spirit of exploration.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Here they are, the things I saw in my studio out of which I composed the painting Frames of Reference.

Whether based on life
or imagination, artists are always composing,
assembling, organising selected fragments
into something more than the sum of their
parts. Not only artists - isn't everyone
engaged in the same task, within the composition-factory
that is the mind? Our memories, opinions,
beliefs, the story of our lives - isn't all
this a carefully constructed composition
that we create and re-arrange daily, a work-in-progress?

How about this for
an experiment:

Identify a number of
things which you consider to be most significant
in shaping your life, your self. Give
them each a visual form - could be symbols,
photos, cut-outs, whatever - doesn't have
to be literal. Assemble these fragments into
a composition of some kind. Publish it to
your blog. Discuss!

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Unless I see something
else that needs changing (and I may) Frames
of Reference (formerly
known as Prism, formerly known as My
DNA ) is done. Here it is along with
a close-up of the top left-hand corner where
I've painted a version of the whole
snapshot of my parents which was the basis
for the two central figures.

I
believe this painting is about different
dimensions of space and time and maybe multiple
universes but any and all interpretations
are welcome.

Do you have typical
days, when the pattern of the previous day
is repeated almost identically,
like wallpaper ? Can you remember
all details of the pattern? Here's one of
mine.

Got up about 10
am when the phone rang. I usually set the
alarm clock for an optimistic 7:30 but since
I rarely get to bed before 3 or 4 am, when
it rings I switch it off, reasoning that
I deserve another couple of hours. Mornings
are something I would like to be better acquainted
with and enjoy the benefits
of more often. My mornings are blurry,
foggy, indecisive. Decisions like: should
I turn on the computer or have breakfast
loom unresolved. Breakfast won today
so I shuffled to the kitchen wearing pyjamas
and red bathrobe - this is a very old mumsy
robe which I must get rid of. Something
jazzier and more morning-friendly is required,
as long as it doesn't have a belt. I hate
belted robes so don't get me one if you're
thinking of it.

Breakfast is two wholewheat
mini-pitta (from Marks & Spencer)
toasted in the toaster then spread with unsalted
butter and a couple of slices of Emmental.
An apple, a clementine, a cup of maté,
no sugar or honey. While consuming this petit
déjeuner I read yesterday's newspaper,
the Independent. Because my morning brain
is foggy, I read everything, even if I'm
not interested. I have been known to read
the advertisements for cars, which
I have no interest in whatsoever. Droning
in my blurry consciousness is a robot voice
which sounds, I'm afraid, like Stephen Hawking,
insisting that I should stop this robotic
behaviour and Get On With The Day.

Eventually I obey and
shuffle to the bathroom. No, first I
turn on the computer to check email
and to find out if there are any
comments here on the blog. Well, overnight
somebody in another time zone might have
commented, innit? Bugger, no
new comments. Quick peek at my stats:
not much traffic there either. Shit.
But wait: the stats say I've had 699 visitors
so far this month - 699 and October has
just begun! That's more people than I've
met in my entire life, probably. Okay
maybe it's not 699 visitors but 699 visits. Even
if it's only 300 people that's still
more real people than I actually
know. So what if they don't
comment? They have visited this space
and I should be gleeful. I am gleeful.
I make a couple of administrative phone
calls.Then I put some laundry
in the washing machine. Then I go in
the bathroom.

Bathroom business
takes quite a while. I need to stand in the shower
for at least ten minutes even though
that's terribly wasteful, ecologically speaking,
because only hot water running down the back
of my neck dispels the brain
fog. I dress in my painting clothes, old
striped purple top and blue no-Yoga Yoga
trousers and then it's face-the-face time:
in magnifying mirror on bedroom window-sill
I examine my morning mug and adjust whatever
can be adjusted, which is not much. A
bit of concealer under the eyes, some plucking
of stray hairs, lipstick. Now
I'm ready for the day. It's
about 2 pm.

I go upstairs to my
studio and confront The Painting (DNA/Prism/Frames
of Reference). I stand back and examine what
still needs to be done. While
I'm working I notice how much painting ressembles
carpentry or construction in general. All
about fitting this into that, balancing,
assessing, eliminating, concealing, revealing.
It's not glamorous or inspirational, it's
just work - if some mystery or chemistry
subsequently occurs between viewer and
finished canvas, that's a bonus. I
work until about 5 pm then
go downstairs and make coffee, eat a couple
of biscuits and a clementine. Quick look
at email then back upstairs. More work
on the painting until daylight starts to
fade. Very annoyed that the days are getting
shorter. Have to stop, the colours are wrong
under electric light. The painting still
needs more work, I'll do it tomorrow. It's
about 7 pm.

I start preparing dinner,
my only real meal of the day. I've got some
organic beef and a lot of vegetables. I rarely
eat beef but when I do, I like to make a
hearty dish and tonight a casserole suits
the approach of winter. I'm a good cook,
if I say so myself, unschooled but creative
within a limited range. Occasionally I'll
follow a recipe but mostly I improvise, throwing
together flavours I like. Turn the oven on
to 200C and while it heats up, sauté the
beef chunks in a bit of olive oil with a
chopped red onion, garlic, chopped ginger,
a red pepper. Add spices: cumin, coriander,
thyme, black pepper, salt. A dash of red
wine and stir on high heat until the meat
is well-browned. The oven is ready so
transfer the contents of the pan into a
deep earthenware pot, add more red wine
then pile in the rest of the chopped vegetables:
carrots, new potatoes, parsnips, courgette,
baby corn. Put the lid on the pot and bung
the thing in the oven. It will take an hour
and a half/two hours. Meanwhile I nibble
a few black olives and drink cold coffee
in a tall glass with ice cubes and a dash
of port, the real Portuguese Port from Porto,
a recent gift. I don't know if my mixture
is a proper drink but it tastes good.

Back to the computer
to look at email again, write a few replies,
browse some blogs, then begin writing this
blog post. Around 9:30 pm the delicious smell
says my dinner is ready. I add some quickly
boiled fresh peas to the mix and ladle out
a very generous helping of my casserole.
It is exquisite, of course. Half a glass
of red wine remains in the bottle so I drink
it. A clementine is my dessert. End of food
for today. Washing up can wait until
morning.

I come back to the
Mac and move the August and September
blog posts to my archive. It is now five
past 1 am on October 13 and I think I will
go to bed unless I decide to add a picture
to this post and then maybe browse some
blogs.

Friday, October 08, 2010

I had booked early
for this show, hoping to transform my indifference
to Gauguin into enthusiasm. I've seen his
paintings in museums here and there and of
course in reproductions - his art
seems made for high-tech printing, looks
great in coffee-table
books and on posters, cards, scarves, bags
and baubles such as those currently adorning
the Tate Modern shop. But I don't think I
ever saw a comprehensive collection of his
work gathered in one place so this was an
opportunity to lose my immunity to his universal
appeal.

Keeping eyes wide
open, I amble respectfully through the galleries,
stopping for long reflective pauses. The
background story I'm familiar with so I ignore
the big wall-captions and never ever opt
for portable audio-guide - no matter how
informative, I don't want somebody's voice
interrupting my own impressions.
I need to have silence
in my head to allow the work itself to speak
to me, unmediated, if it's going
to speak at all.

One thing immediately
creates a barrier between the painting
and the viewer: those frames! Those
ornate, overwrought, overweight, overprotective
gold frames - why why why do museum
curators still think they must burden modern
paintings with these antiquated trimmings?
Do they think that art
won't seem like great art to the public unless
it's got ten inches of baroque chocolate
box icing around it?

Never mind
the frames, what about the work? Am I dazzled,
excited, inspired? Well...yes and no.
Gauguin's prints, woodcuts and wood-carvings
are marvellous - the craftsman-artisan in
him is at ease in solid media, materials
he can cut and gouge and smoothe and polish.
In many of his drawings there is the
same sense of inhabiting the medium, neither
dominated by or dominating it. Noa-Noa is
a masterpiece. But put him in front of
a canvas and Gauguin becomes self-conscious:
he's got a message, he is an illustrator,
a decorator, he makes pretty
patterns out of a pretty setting. I
go back and forth in the rooms, absorbing
different periods of his work, but only four
or five paintings escape the shocking
conclusion forming in my mind that, underneath
the bohemian runaway rogue artist with
his hat and cape and exotic teen-age vahine, a
conventional, bourgeois banker is trying
to get out.

Compare Gauguin to
Van Gogh - I'm sorry but I have to make that
comparison - and the difference is obvious.
Vincent loses himself in the subject he chooses
to paint, he is entranced by it, his technique
is entirely at the service of it. All that
he has learned about colour and form sits
before a tree, a field or a person and humbly
offers itself, like a lover. I'm yours, he
says. Every drawing and painting is for Van
Gogh a love affair and the pen or brush
caresses the love-object, coaxes it to reveal
itself.

For Gauguin painting
is not such a visceral, intuitive experience.
He's attracted to the picturesque, the exotic,
and uses elements of it to construct
a mythical scenario. He has an agenda. 'Maker
of Myth' is an apt description of the man
as well as the artist. I think that when
Paul came to Arles, finally giving in to
Vincent's lonely and hero-worshipping entreaties,
he must have been stunned by the work Vincent
had produced. Gauguin was sensitive enough
to realise that this work was something unprecedented
and perhaps he knew in his heart that it
was far beyond anything he himself could
have created. Of course this is just conjecture,
but my feeling is that his pride couldn't
allow him to admit this and the famous Gauguin/Van
Gogh fight and ensuing ear-slicing incident
was an explosion of these undercurrents -
Paul's envy and competitiveness, Vincent's
disappointment that Paul had not expressed
the appreciation of his work that he had
hoped for.

So, am I glad I saw
Gauguin at Tate Modern? Absolutely. Do I
recommend this show? Definitely. Did I lose
my immunity to Gauguin? No, apart from the
prints and wood-carvings.